Educational Science

1st Death Tied to Outbreak of E. Coli in Romaine Lettuce — How It Kills

Health officials have reported the first death in connection with a nationwide E. coli outbreak tied to romaine lettuce. The death occurred in a California patient, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Overall, the outbreak has sickened 121 people in 25 states since mid-March, and 52...

Death mask of King Henry VII is brought to astonishing life in a digital restoration

The somber face of Britain's King Henry VII was recently given a digital makeover, in an astonishingly photorealistic reconstruction. Graphic artist Matt Loughrey produced the image of the deceased king from Henry VII's death mask, which was cast in 1509. Loughrey is the founder of My Colorful Past, a project...

Feeling as though nobody gets you may be linked to persistent thoughts of death. People who frequently feel alienated, isolated and misunderstood are more likely than others to have thoughts of death and dying swirling around in their minds, new research finds. It's not yet clear whether these feelings of...

After Death, Your Microbiome Could Still Help the Living

You don't need to be alive for your microbiome to be useful to science. After years of studying the populations of bacteria on living people, researchers are now turning their sights on the dead. And they're finding that the postmortem microbiome is useful not only for forensic investigations, but also...

'Stench of death' compound helps your body feast on its own rotting cells

The scent wafts from busy roadsides, broken meat lockers and grisly crime scenes; it's the signature stink of rotting flesh. Despite its putrid aroma, the chemical compound may serve an important purpose in the living human body, new research suggests. The compound, known as putrescine, flips a switch in certain...

Does Drinking Ayahuasca Really Feel Like a Near-Death Experience?

The edge of death is a lot like drinking a cup of tea. That, more or less, is the conclusion of a paper published yesterday (Aug. 15) in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Of course, it depends on the tea. The researchers were focused on ayahuasca — a tea from...

Woman Declared Dead Found Alive in Morgue Fridge

A woman in South Africa who was declared dead after a grizzly car crash and placed in a morgue refrigerator was actually still alive, according to news reports. She was eventually found breathing in the morgue fridge. The woman had been traveling in a car with four other people on...

'Flatliners' still have heartbeats left. But death comes within 5 minutes.

Death is not a linear process. New research finds that it's fairly common for the heart to restart — usually just for a beat or two — after a person initially flatlines. No one in the study, which took place in intensive care units (ICUs) in three countries, survived or...

Scientists Calculate the Speed of Death in Cells, and It's Surprisingly Slow

Cells in our bodies die all the time, and now we know just how fast. Scientists found that death travels in unremitting waves through a cell, moving at a rate of 30 micrometers (one-thousandth of an inch) every minute, they report in a new study published Aug. 10 in the...